‘Italian economy takes a body blow’ is a subtle example of a BBC headline on 1 March 2020 which was less impartial than we might expect. ‘Body blow’ is a metaphor that conjures a painful impact on the economy. Rather than leading with a fact about the drop in GDP, or the prediction of recession, this headline is a more colourful, editorialised headline. I asked Cook her opinion: ‘The term “body blow” is acceptable if it describes a literal fact, but not to dramatise and exaggerate. That’s wrong.’ The BBC’s coverage was so remarkably fear-mongering during the epidemic that in January 2021 Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson labelled the organisation the ‘Body Bag Corporation’.9
I deliberately chose a subtle illustration here because it’s easily forgiven. The issue is it wasn’t an isolated example: it was one of hundreds of dramatised headlines about a single virus. They all add up to create a more powerful impression. Among a wealth of other articles about the epidemic in Italy, this headline created a feeling of ‘doom-mongering’, according to Cook: ‘All the examples from Italy dramatise things to sound important and make people sit up and listen. I wonder whether the content is less important than the dramatic impact. Ultimately, it’s destructive of trust.’ I asked the BBC journalist who wrote the story about this choice of headline and for a wider discussion about the BBC’s Covid coverage, but he declined to answer.
Sky News reported on 19 March 2020 that army vehicles were brought in to transport dead bodies in Bergamo. This would make you think that army trucks were needed because there were so many bodies. In fact, according to the Italian Funeral Industry Federation,10 70% of undertakers had to stop work to quarantine at the start of the outbreak, so the army was drafted in for a one-off transport of 60 coffins. The startling image of the army transporting the dead was not explained, but it appeared on Sky and other broadcasters and in newspapers here in the UK and around the world, seeding the idea of an almost unmanageable number of corpses.
One reason that the same stories proliferate globally, and that sources are not always thoroughly fact-checked by news outlets, is the reliance on news agencies. There are three main global news agencies: Associated Press, Reuters and Agence-France Presse. Much of the text, images and video you see in broadcast and print has come from those three agencies. This means there is far less diversity in reporting than you might think, especially on foreign news. If one of the big three agencies doesn’t report on it, as far as most of the Western media goes, it didn’t happen. And agency reporting of geopolitical stories can be subtly deduced from a similarity in tone, as well as the same images and sometimes text.
Journalists are human and subject to the same fears as the rest of us. We are all made of the same psychological stuff. Perhaps their fears clouded their judgement and reporting. They might not have had time, in the teeth of the crisis, to thoroughly investigate every image and video supplied by the picture desk. Yet the result was weeks and months of relentlessly emotional bad news that lacked context and rigour.
How did the relentless fear in the media affect politicians? They also read the news and live with the same cultural wallpaper, so they are not immune to the effects. In an interesting insight, Matt Hancock, the Minister for Health, revealed in an an interview11 on LBC Radio in 2021 that he had placed large orders for Covid vaccines as a result of watching the fictional film Contagion. This seems to have turned out well for our vaccine supplies, but it’s a remarkable admission about the influence of a sensationalist Hollywood film (about a fictional virus that kills 30% of people who catch it) on the Health Secretary.
Fear and time are two factors that might explain the fear-mongering, but there are two more. I asked a broadsheet comment writer why newspapers used so many doom-laden headlines. ‘Narcissism and greed drive this,’ he said. ‘Pay rises are linked to the top-performing articles. The journalists who get the highest views for articles and the most subscriptions generated for the paper get the biggest pay rises. You want your stories to get the most views.’
I asked him for an example: ‘When SAGE came out with the prediction of half a million deaths, the newspaper instantly published it to get the headline out immediately, rather than interrogate it. Within five minutes it’s out there as a headline. Then a few hours later there’s a more sceptical article. But the first story has had the impact, not the sceptical one. When Whitty and Vallance predicted 4,000 deaths a day in October we knew straight away that would be the headline. But a good journalist should say, this doesn’t pass the sniff test, they should research it and not publish it verbatim. Sure, a couple of days later there’s an article dissecting the numbers, but it doesn’t get the same take up as the first story.’ The article gets the views. The journalist gets the pay rise. We have panic. The damage is done.
Not all journalists fed us a constant diet of fear. Like Sue Cook, I also regretfully switched off Radio 4. I found Talk Radio, which had a broader variety of guests. Talk Radio presenter Dan Wootton’s motto in 2020 was, ‘No spin, no bias and no hysteria.’ I spoke to him about his approach on his radio show and also his column in The Sun.
Wootton had Covid at the same time as Boris Johnson, meaning he understood it could be a seriously unpleasant illness, but from the beginning he didn’t agree lockdown was the right policy economically, socially or in terms of other health costs. He said he thought that on
